And today I am forty one years old. Boy time flies. I had actually forgotten that I had a birthday even coming up until a friend in Dubai wished me a happy birthday last night and I was about to correct him and went to figure out how many months it would be until my birthday and realized that in Dubai, it already was! So surprise to me.
I was up at nine this morning. Last night Liesl made a big deal about wanting to wake up early, before me, so that she could make me breakfast and clean the house to have everything ready for my birthday. But I knew that that was never going to happen. The girls rarely wake up before noon.
I did the laundry this morning, too. So much to do when you are a single parent for this long. Can’t save anything for when Dominica gets home, that’s still at least four days from now!
I got out to the shops and got more water, cheese and bread. When I got home Liesl had just woken up. She set right about making breakfast for me which consisted of bread with butter and honey and a yellow delicious apple. She did as much of the prep as she could and used the new loaf of sesame bread that I had just gotten at the store – delicious.
Liesl ran around the house attempting to decorate it for my birthday as much as she could on her own. She has some little paper confetti streamers that they were given in the park the other day that she laid on furniture to make it look festive. Luciana woke up and helped her as well.
Luciana did not want to be left out and so went to the kitchen and took a piece of bread and tore a heart shaped hole in the center of it, added butter and honey (with my help) and prepared an apple for me and placed it in the center of the bread for my lunch.
My girls are the sweetest.
I did a little writing while Luciana came upstairs and played their Barbie Puppy Rescue video game on Steam. Liesl used the time to be alone down in the living room.
Luciana asked if they could buy the movie that goes with the video game. She conferred with Liesl and they both agreed that it would be a perfect movie for them. So I finally gave in and bought it for them on Amazon. They immediately set up in the living room and watched it not once but twice, right in a row.
This game me some time to write and then to fire up the video game Renowned Explorers that I have been wanting to play and gave it a try.
I managed to do laundry, as well to do the dishes. We had cleaned the living room last night. Luciana grabbed a broom and swept up much of the house, too.
We had a surprise tour of the house to give this evening. Of course we had laundry out, the house was a mess, I was in pajamas… we had no idea that someone was coming by for a tour. Oh well.
I got several articles written today. A few chapters on a book on System Administration written; plus a few articles on my Linux Administration book.
For dinner we went out and got pizza and French fries from the panino truck down on the square. Lots of people out tonight, town is very busy. The food truck was packed with people. Lots of locals, you can tell that most are not tourists and some I recognize that I’ve seen a week or more ago. The girls played on the square while we waited, as always.
We got home and put on Journey 2: The Mysterious Island that we watched while we ate. Luciana ate one entire pizza on her own, plus her fries! She was hungry. She has moved from her previous tastes in pizza, she is eating Margarita pizzas now. Liesl gets pizza russa, which is “tomato pie” back in Utica. Liesl really liked the movie.
Once we were done eating it was game time. We moved upstairs and adjusted the video game rig so that it was projecting above the bed rather than in front of my desk. This way we could all snuggle in the bed while we played and the screen was much larger than before and square rather than slightly skewed, which worked out really well.
Our first game for the night was Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing. We did about a dozen races. Then Liesl put on The Book of Unwritten Tales and worked on Chapter Two. Adventure games from the bed work really well. We have the Amazon Echo thing for audio, which works quite well. So much better than what we were using last year. We are slowly figuring this stuff all out.
At a quarter after one it was time for teeth brushing and then down for a little bit of time playing Minecraft and then time to read our chapters in our Nancy Drew novel that we are reading. We are about halfway through the novel as of last night. We will not quite be able to finish it before Dominica comes back home, which will likely be on Tuesday.
It was a really nice birthday. Lots of time with my kids. They spent the entire day doting on me and spending time together. It was sad that Dominica could not be here, but there was no way to fix that as the wedding was yesterday and even if she had caught a flight last night directly after the wedding she could not have been down here in Noto in time to make it for my birthday.
It’s been a great week getting loads of time with the girls, though. We are spending all of our time together and it is a nice change. It has been a while since we were able to do that. They are really enjoying having a break from school and responsibilities, too.